Bob Hepburn in The Toronto Star wrote an excellent column on the ginormous, so-called “medium-sized” uglification campaign called the new Toronto blue bin. Excellent column. It reflected exactly my feelings on the matter. I have zero idea where I’m going to put my new, improved blue bin. It doesn’t fit anywhere except as a front-lawn statue to Toronto politicians’ projected garbage guilt.

Apparently, he’s received dozens and dozens of responses to his column and will be writing more. Others have written earlier about these impending (now here in much of the city) bins, but probably because folks couldn’t see them, they vented, then shrugged. But now that they’re here, folks are real upset. They can see what a boondoggle these bins are, how they do not address the garbage problem, and how they contribute to the deteriorating beauty of our city. There is a consensus here, and we can grab the momentum to bring sanity back to Toronto’s garbage policy, but only if we protest loudly and longly. No shrugging and willingly being run over by City Hall!

For many, the problem is where to put it, but for the most vulnerable in society, it’s how to use it. Those with upper body weakness won’t be able to open or close it; those with upper or lower body issues won’t be able to maneuvre it. Those with any kind of weakness or fatigue will find it particularly hard to get it up and down steps, and many, many homes in Toronto have steps, even homes in which people who require canes or wheelchairs live. And this is just bin #1. Ginormous bin #2 for garbage has yet to arrive. And what’s the betting ginormous bin #3 to replace the current green bin will soon follow? One Councillor is working on a way to use this huge medium-sized bin for both recyclables and garbage so that homeowners won’t have to store two, just one; however, if the bin don’t fit and is not usable by the most vulnerable in our society, even one is one too many.

The whole thing is bogus anyway. All garbage, whether straight trash, recyclables, or compostables, is a waste byproduct of our consumption. The more we consume, the more energy we use during manufacturing and sales, and the more garbage is produced, even if it is recyclable. Even worse, manufacturers are using much more packaging than they used to. Some have called for requiring retailers to remove the packaging at the cashier’s desk since so much of it is impossible to get into. I know I’ve ended up throwing out new products as I simply could not open them up. I have no idea how people with (bad) arthritis manage to break open some of these packages, especially those who live alone or with an infirm partner and can’t easily get help from a strong individual. Furthermore, not all plastic is recyclable, yet I bet most people have a hard time figuring out which is which — which can go in the blue box and which can go in the garbage. The whole sorting thing, which requires those calendars, challenges persons with developmental or mental difficulties especially, trying to understand them, never mind able-minded people who simply have a job and family to run.

And in the end, why do we as individuals need to be virtuous about sorting garbage from recycling? It’s not like we choose our products based on whether they’re recyclable or not. I bet only the fanatics and eco-nuts do that. The rest of us don’t. So why is it virtuous for us as individuals to recycle? To assuage our guilt for not making the “right” choice at the time of purchase?

Worse, all this work results only in homeowners’ garbage being sorted, no-one else’s. I’ve written extensively about garbage before, but perhaps the reality of these blue monstrosities will get Torontonians up in arms and moving into action.

If the city really wanted to tackle the garbage crisis, really wanted to be green, really wanted to clean up this city it would do three things:

1. Build a facility that sorts garbage into recyclable, reusable, compostable, and trash. Then go back to picking up all garbage twice a week. The entire city would thus have their garbage sorted. This would also particularly help large families who per person may not produce much garbage but in aggregate do; it would help the infirm and disabled who can’t carry much weight and thus with more frequent pick-ups would have a manageable amount of garbage to put out. It would also get rid of that ridiculous calendar with those incomprehensible dos and don’ts. What a waste of paper that is!
2. Build a clean, modern incinerator, like the ones in Sweden, to create electricity from trash. This would replace the nonrenewable fossil fuel power plant the idiotic Ontario government foisted upon us and allow Toronto to (a) use a renewable resource (trash) to (b) create electricity so that (c) in an event of a natural disaster, Toronto would have a local source of electricity generation that does not reduce our fossil fuels. This would also bring harmony back to our relationships with our neighbours by eradicating the need for landfill and trucks belching smoke down the highway.
3. Band together with other municipalities to force manufacturers to reduce their packaging.
4. Require retailers to remove said packaging at the store — businesses are far more likely to act than apathetic Torontonians in forcing manufacturers to get real about their ridiculous packaging.
5. Recognize that garbage is garbage. One kind is not any more virtuous than another. It’s all waste from consumption. Thus allow people to use bags. In conjunction with item #1, that would mean our sidewalks would be free of clutter so that pedestrians aren’t forced to use the road even after the garbage is picked up, and bags can be tagged. Bag tags have proven effective in other cities in reducing waste and injuries among the sanitation workers. I’m not a big fan but somehow we need to reduce our overall waste production and foisting a humoungous bin on people ain’t going to do it.

Right now we need to protest this blue bin. Make your Councillor so uncomfortable, like the Riverdale residents Hepburn writes about in his column did when they protested, that they will reverse this stupid bin idea and go back to the drawing board. If you don’t know who your Councillor is, click here. And in the meantime refuse to use the new bin. Torontonians used to know how to do protests. Maybe we’ll learn all over again.

“Is Burger King’s Quay a future street name?” asks the Toronto Star this morning.

Waterfront Toronto is so starved of cash — why? are the Feds not ponying up? is the Province hemming and hawing instead of providing financial incentive to get it going? the city is broke, that we know! — that it’s considering giving corporations naming rights to our Waterfront.

Great. Now instead of a relaxing and pleasing-to-the-eye landscape, a place of beauty and rest, especially for Torontonians unable to leave the city for vacation spots, we’ll have a length of lakefront dotted with inane names like Rogers Centre. It’s bad enough the government reneged on their promise to keep the name SkyDome, but now we’re told that we may have every single square mm of our visual landscape littered with these stupid names, which names will be guaranteed to change everytime the Waterfront needs more money and a different company steps up to the plate.

To wit, I am now completely lost as to where I’m supposed to go with some venues as the name changes every time I turn around, it seems.  I even get stopped on the street and asked for directions to such-and-such a place, except that that place no longer exists, well, it physically exists, just that the name no longer applies. This is the big problem when you follow the American model instead of the European model and when the big governments swimming in cash do not fund the small governments and public property properly.

Not long ago, a manager at the TTC said that that brake dust was responsible for the grime coating every surface in a subway station, couldn’t simply be washed off, and made it impossible to keep the system clean, as if that was a new problem, making me wonder how previous generations of TTC janitors managed to clean off the brake dust so that the stations always looked spotless. And then I started thinking…. Rather dangerous because sometimes you shouldn’t think. Thinking takes you places you can’t do thing one about.

“When aluminum ceiling slats are removed to make repairs or renovations above them, the black soot can’t be scrubbed off with water and is still there when they go back up. The soot on the top side of the slats is so thick that it oozes back down over the face of the slats for days after it becomes wet, which only makes the problem worse.” The Toronto Star, 15 March 2008

If, as that manager asserted, that brake dust is like glue resisting efforts to even hose it off when they take those ceiling boards down for maintenance work, just what is that fine brake dust doing to my poor little alveoli? You see, the thing about lungs is that there’s no nano-biomechanical engineer going in there regularly with his little scrub brushes and pails of soapy water to scrub all the grime off the mucus membrane surfaces. We already know from smokers that the lung’s natural cleaning ability is no match for man-made particles. So has that dust laid itself on my alveoli like a fine coating of plaster, preventing the oxygen from slipping through the alveoli’s membrane into the bloodstream? Are asthma rates going up because more people are using the subway systems all around the world and fine brake dust is clogging up and irritating their lungs? You see where thinking takes you?

Jack Lakey was focussed on the filthy state of the TTC, but I’m amazed no one at The Star picked up on the bigger story: the effect of grimy, fine brake dust on the lungs of all us regular passengers.

The Toronto Star had an interesting article regarding one of Canada’s engineering achievements, the AVRO ARROW.  A product of the Cold War it was designed to be Canada’s answer to protecting America from Northern threats as a supersonic all weather interceptor/bomber.   Ahead of its time (the Arrow could fly at twice the speed of sound – faster than our current fleet of CF-18s) the plane was even a potential export to our Allies (though the US or the UK weren’t interested in purchasing foriegn produced aircraft).  In any case it was a world class plane.

It was all for nothing in the end.  John Diefenbaker, the Conservative PM from the west, decided that despite AVRO being the the third largest corporation in Canada, employing some 41,000 people, that the Arrow project should be cancelled.  Many conspiracy theories exist as to why Canada’s National Defence and soveriegnty were trumped in this case.  (RL Whitcomb has an opinion as do many others)  Was it PM Diefenbaker’s way of improving American relations after to committing to NORAD?  Was the project costing Canadian taxpayers too much for what was delivered?  We may never know.

It will be interesting to see if MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd, MDA,  is sold off in the coming days or weeks.  So far opponents have delayed the sale. Considering that the US and now Russia are limiting foreign ownership of key industries why can’t we do the same?  Have concerns about sovereignty and protecting the North really changed?  If the Conservatives allow the maker of the Canadarm and the recently launched Radarsat-2 satellite to be sold off they may be following the footsteps of Diefenbaker’s Conservatives.  After all renting (or have a contract to use) our locally developed technology is not the same as owning it.

It’s amazing what getting creamed in an election and having an entire riding pissed at you for your high-handed ways will do to a party’s attitude to the big city.

“”Dalton McGuinty likes to blame others for his problems,” Flaherty told a somewhat bewildered business audience expecting a preview of the federal budget.” (Toronto Star, 10-03-08)

The former finance minister for Ontario under the Mike Harris Tories, the same party that never got rid of the province’s deficit, I might add, Jim Flaherty attacks the Premier, the man who beat his provincial party in the polls — do I detect a hint of sour grapes? — for financial incompetence. It’s rather strange that Prime Minister Stephen Harper let him speak as it was, but to let him go on and on about the business taxes in Ontario — which would not have to be so high if the other nine provinces, three territories, and Ottawa didn’t keep sucking the Ontario tax teat dry — and how it’s all the Liberals fault Ontario is tanking, never mind that Flaherty participated in the cancelling of the infrastructure and city-building projects when the Harris Tories came into power, is just unprecedented. After all, the PM is known for putting duct tape on the mouths of all federal Tories two years ago when they came into power.
So obviously Harper agrees with him.

Then suddenly we had the odd spectacle of Flaherty enthusiastically giving Toronto — that evil city, the blight of Canada — over $300 million for, gasp, transit! Yes, they’d promised some money over a year ago. But after all the belly aching about Toronto, and now Ontario, one hardly expected them to be serious and for Flaherty to be in the photo op. And to announce that the money is going towards hybrid buses is even more surprising. They really have been converted on the road to a hotter Damascus.

But have they?

I doubt it. Flaherty said a couple of days ago on television that the federal Conservatives needed to build in the 416. Whoa! I thought the Harper Tories figured they could win a majority sans Toronto. Isn’t that why they’ve watched as our city has sunk more and more into the mire of poverty? Isn’t that why they’ve blamed us and our politicians for our woes and troubles? Isn’t that why they haven’t followed the lead of their US mentors by funding transit and rebuilding infrastructure and giving us back some of the billions in taxes they suck out of us?

Apparently, that by-election they put off and put off and angered one riding by getting rid of the Tory candidate who’d been campaigning like a dog for months and then lengthened before finally getting it done, taught them a few things. They need cities. They need Toronto. And now they’re sucking up to us and kissing our asses. Former Conservative PM Brian Mulroney won several seats in Toronto. Some of elected became important members of his cabinet. That’s how he kept his political lock on the country. Whether the rest of the country likes it or not, Ontario is the engine of Canada — as Harper belatedly acknowledged yesterday on television, standing in front of kids’ drawings — and Toronto is the engine of Ontario. We are the biggest city in the country, we are its financial centre, we are the city the world knows best, and we support the country with billions of our bucks. We go down, you go down. I don’t believe that Harper and Flaherty get that yet. I believe that all this sudden new conciliatory attitude to my city, my province, is all to get votes in the election they’re trying to get going if only the Liberals would vote against them in one of those upteen bogus confidence motions they keep throwing out. Once they have their majority, they’ll ignore us again and go back to creating greater division between us and the rest of Canada. The best thing for Toronto is to keep them on a tight leash. Minority governments all the way because the Liberals ignore us too, just not in such a mean fashion.

This is not strictly Toronto news, especially as jPod is set in Vancouver, but I received a comment on my blog from “Kam Fong” that jPod is being cancelled, which I wanted to share with you all here. I have to say I’m really surprised at this news. I had found the show rather addictive and thought it was coming into its own.

With the dearth of Canadian programming, and with CBC launching an all-out assault in January to grab Canadian eyes for Canadian shows that employ Canadians, I would have thought they would at least give all the shows a decent time to build an audience. After all, don’t they say Seinfeld was so-so in the ratings the entire first year of its run?

Read what the actor has to say and if you want jPod back, give that phone number a ring or shoot off an e-mail to CBC. We really need an alternative to all that reality dreck and the drowning of our airwaves in foreign shows, that is, American programming.

TheStar.com | GTA | Sick transit: TTC dirty, leaky, decaying

“Dingy, decaying, depressing, and definitely not The Better Way.”

No kidding! It’s not just sick, it’s comatose and on life support, heading to the morgue. I knew that the day I saw a rat bold as you please sniffing the subway platform, way above its usual haunt of the subway tracks.

“Councillor Adam Giambrone, who chairs the TTC, says the people who’ve complained about deteriorating conditions are wrong.”

Giambrone as usual has his inexperienced head up his ass. A dirty system is still a dirty system; whether or not it’s as garbage- and filth-strewn as it was two years ago, it’s still filthier now than it was decades ago.

“There’s a lot more to cleaning a subway station than it might seem, said [Gary] Shortt. For example, the black grime coating so many surfaces is a fine dust created when the brakes on trains are applied as they slow while pulling into stations.”

He goes into detail about how this grime can’t simply be washed off and requires maintenance staff to do it, instead of janitorial, which of course explains only a few walls, those not near a platform, and not the rest of the walls and floors. Plus how on earth did the staff manage to keep stations shining 20, 30 years ago? Were they just better workers back then? Judging by how much more surface drivers had to do back then and how much better they were at ensuring people knew where to get off, I’d hazard a yes to that.

Jack Lakey, The Fixer at The Toronto Star, is certainly taking on quite the task this week, challenging the TTC to fix up their system. The TTC whiners have one thing right — subway riders have become incredibly disgusting in their habits. OTOH, maybe they always were, but TTC janitors used to be adept at cleaning up after them and so we just never knew what inconsiderate and filthy hogs Torontonians were and are. And isn’t that what’s wrong with the city today — of which the TTC is in microcosm? That we no longer reflect our best Sunday suit to ourselves and the world. Instead, we’ve degenerated and now show the unwashed Sunday lie-in side, to such an extent that when I told some new Torontonians that the city used to have a continent-wide reputation for being really clean, they laughed and laughed. They thought I was kidding. No folks, I’m not. We used to be so clean, Hollywood had to truck in garbage to make our streets look believable for the big screen. I don’t think they do now. They probably have to haul out the power washer and litter picker-uppers. How sad. How very, very sad.

Yesterday Global News Ontario reported that house sales are down dramatically in Toronto, yet have risen in a couple of 905 areas like Richmond Hill or Ajax. The thrust of the report was that the new land transfer tax is already affecting house sales in the 416 area, and then they ended it by saying maybe it was the weather because you couldn’t park anywhere in order to view houses.

Personally, I think it’s too early to tell. Year-over-year sales may be an indicator that the new Toronto land transfer tax is already chilling sales, yet the housing market doesn’t start heating up traditionally until the end of February or early spring. It’s usually a bit slow at this point in time, and so I’d be more interested in seeing what sales do in April, May, and June. Although I still believe doubling the land transfer tax for Toronto homes only was a dumb idea, I don’t think we can say “see, we told you so” yet.

–

It was nice that Toronto finally decided to shave the snow banks in my neighbourhood down to an easy-to- drive-onto height. And I totally get why side streets need to be plowed in the middle of the night, but could we possibly refrain from scaring the bejeesus out of us sound sleepers by not plowing the bare asphalt in a futile and very-late attempt to get rid of the tall snow-and-ice rut down the middle of the road. I thought Armageddon was descending upon me when this scraping thunder roared into my sleep, convincing me something nasty was coming right into my bedroom. And why was my street’s snow rut plowed several hundred times, and the rest of my neighbourhood left untouched?

–

And because I can’t leave this post without making at least one comment on Toronto’s stupid garbage policy, let me just note that I had to walk on the road the other day because the EMPTY bins were hogging the cleared part of the sidewalk. Now if the garbage had been put in bags, the sidewalk would have been free and clear for pedestrians to use once the garbage truck had trundled on by.

A devastating fire hit Queen Street early this morning. Several business along the strip including Duke’s Cycle were hit by the blaze. My heart goes out to the residents and business owners faced with such a thing.

Note the TTC have diverted the 501 Queen Streetcar down to King to avoid the fire scene.

TheStar.com | News | We don’t deserve this horrorchitecture

I loved the words Christopher Hume uses to describe the new structure finally arising out of the ashes of Yonge Street’s old has-been, city-expropriated architecture: “nasty dark grey bunker”, “galactic coal-carrier”, “lumpen excuse for a building”, “dead and inert”. And what is this lumpen grey bulky coal carrier called? “Time Life Square.” I had no idea. Did you?

I haven’t see it. But it doesn’t surprise me that a city that thinks cluttering up our sidewalks with garbage bins once a week and converting our neighbourhoods from flora to trash showcases would A-OK horrorchitecture. After all, a city hall that couldn’t care less about the downward spiral of our collective living space from being the cleanest and greenest on the continent to littered and stinky, is not going to care much about what the buildings look like. We really are dependent on individuals, corporations, and developers to ensure we have architecture that one can admire and that provokes (good) thought. For the most part, they’ve been letting us down.

Still, there have been a few shining lights, especially recently. The Crystal at the ROM is a masterpiece that adds to Avenue Road and Bloor, no matter whether one likes it or not. The new opera hall elevates the intellectual life of our city. And Citytv, now owned by Rogers, its iconic building stormed by CTV, may yet save Yonge and Dundas.

Photo by Points North

The Yonge-Dundas Square is attractive, in a urban, hard-edged way, until one looks to the east side and sees that rather messy temporary structure. It really brings the whole place down. How about erecting a permanent stage of beauty, like the shell at the CNE? (Perhaps Citytv with their penchant for taking over the area around their building may do just that.)

But no matter what a few good corporations do, somehow the citizens of Toronto are going to have to find their moxie and counter the efforts of city hall to turn our urban oasis into a grey dump.